Want to hear EDS?

Charlie Bess of EDS,with whom I’ve had some fascinating conversations has stuck his voice above the parapet and talks about the issues of 2006 in the Grumpy Middle Manager Podcast .

The podcast is absolutely worth your time - the host has a great offbeat take to business management. Worth a lot more is a free subscription to the channel (This link will hook directly to your Yahoo! page.)

One of Charlie’s themes is about the IT spaghetti soup that many organisations are juggling. He talks about the cost of maintaining the IT status quo. In our game, a good example is the need to keep accounts processing, book-keeping, tax, practice management, document management and on and on.

He talks about siloing of information - for example tax and audit - and how that’s extremely bad for business. (I say the same in a number of places.) His punchline:

 The future’s out there, it’s not really well distributed

Arctic Systems replay

At AccountingWEB, Simon Sweetman pens an excellent analysis of where we are with Arctic Systems. I have commented extensively on the issues around language and timing. One of the problems of maintaining momentum is that people cannot always see everything they need when reviewing such situations. I for instance am constantly flipping between articles to get a sense of what’s happening.

I have therefore created a set of links to some of the more important discussions around this case from a variety of sources. It is not a perfect ‘book’ and it is not meant to be. But it does provide a resource that readers might wish to dip into from time to time. There are four ways to access the material.

1. If you’d like to see a date ordered list of posts that cover the topic organised in the user ‘arctic’ then click here. 
2. You can find an editable list by clicking on this link to Furl. When you get there, login with the username: arctic and the password: hmrclose1 This will take you to the page with the post links. You can edit the selection of posts, add further comments to individual posts, change the ratings and of course use it as a source for improving your knowledge of the case. Contributing will add the greatest value to the listing for all those who read this stuff.
3. If you’d rather do a more scatter gun search then I’d still go to Furl only search using the ’search facility at the bottom left of the home page.
4. Alternatively, you can click onto this Arctic Systems page link and you will find a set of links to a 9-article subset of the articles referenced at Furl. 

This list will change as more articles are added. If you wish to add pages to the collection then I suggest you register for Furl in your own name and get the Furl button for your browser toolbar. The instructions are self explanatory.

2006 predictions revisited

I’ve already lobbed my two penn’orth into the predictions mix but this one from the Mercury News caught my eye:

"The office moves to the Web Documents, e-mail and spreadsheets move off your desktop computer to the Web.

A host of Companies big and small are building new ways to transfer the computer desktop experience onto the Web, and we expect that trend to accelerate in 2006."

Not everyone agrees but as they’re at the centre of current investment, who am I to differ? Meanwhile, the luddites boys at AccountingWEB think I’m at risk of becoming intoxicated by the smoke that gets blown out of Silicon Valley’s backside. Believe me when I say I can detect the smell of BS, even from this distance. So far, most of the offerings have been decidedly underwhelming but I do see that changing over time. Quite how this will all come together given the anticipated launch of Office 12 is far from clear and the dissent that exists in the Microsoft camp as to which direction to take.

Vinnie Marchandani weighs in with his predictions around services and outsourcing. One I missed in the run-up to Christmas but which could stall offshoring decisions is:

"SaaS models will come under increased scrutiny from buyers about stringent SLAs and business continuity plans. In 2001, after the India/Pakistan nuclear war threat, Indian vendors  went through a similar spike in scrutiny. After last week’s well publicized outage at salesforce.com , this will become a required due diligence step in evaluating SaaS options. The scrutiny helped Indian vendors mature - it will similarly increase corporate confidence in SaaS."

Vinnie’s right on this and I’d certainly recommend keeping a close eye on the growth of companies like Twinfield and WinWeb to see how they cope under the strain of what I already believe will be a year of spectacular growth.  

SalesForce.com lights out for 10+ hours

The ’software as a service’ movement got a royal raspberry yesterday when SalesForce.com went pear shaped for 10+ hours. The story is well worth reading given that I believe SaaS is set to become a major contender to mainstream client/server and desktop applications.

The most common weakness among SaaS offerings is the companies’ development perspective. Too often the emphasis is on ‘good enough get to market’ thinking. That may be fine in the consumer world but in the businesss world? Don’t feed me that crap! It doesn’t happen that way.

So when I was reviewing Twinfield I was especially interested in the issue of scale. They have 10,000+ end users in the Netherlands. BDO is a flagship customer. Can the mighty SAP point me to a customer who can talk in terms of that level of single instance scale? I know what I think but I’d rather let SAP answer.

Will Twinfield scale to say 100K sure. 1 million? probably. 10 million? I don’t know. Will we see the warning signs? Certainly. These guys know that having financial information available 24×7 is no longer optional. It’s a tick in the box. It’s what they’re banking on delivering.

Can Sage show this level of adoption? No. Can any of the entrenched 2005 players inthe UK market? No. Wind back the clock. Given what we’ve seen happen in 15 short years and seeing what we do today. Don’t you think that’s scary? I do.

That’s why I’m betting on SaaS. In 1990, D&B were the largest software company in the world. SAP was struggling to make $10 million in revenues in the US. As John Lennon might say: "Imagine…"

Endnote: certain RSS readers may see this story as headlined "NetSuite…" This is entirely wrong and a genuine mistake on my part.

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